Going local: The importance of language for mobile app revenues

Wednesday 4th of July 2012 - 09:18:46 PM

You’ve spent all the hard work making the app – designing, coding, testing, debugging, debugging, debugging, porting – and finally you are ready to publish it world wide to as many app stores as you can, but with one problem: Your app – and the associated marketing material – is in one language, possibly two. If this sounds familiar, you are are hurting your chances for generating a good return for your hard work.

Data from Distimo shows that a disproportionate amount of revenues are generated from apps that are localized:

The graph shows that for instance in the iTunes App Store in Turkey, only 2% of the apps are localized in Turkish, yet account for 30% of the revenues. Considering only 17% of the population speaks English in Turkey, this is a huge impact. It gets even more extreme in Russia: Only 4.9% of the population speaks English, and approximately 5% of the apps are localized – however those apps account for over 70% of the revenue!

Clearly there are untapped opportunities. According to Vision Mobile, 85% of apps are published in English, 21% in Spanish and 16% in Chinese, implying that at least some developers use multiple languages. The contrast is of course that English only addresses about 8% of the world’s population. When looking at the smartphone penetration, English speaking markets dominate, but clearly Europe is important and local languages there do matter:

But the main point about this graph is really about the opportunity. By localizing in multiple language you set yourself up to make far more money than when you do not. This is a key point we at CodeNgo take seriously, and will therefore in the not too distant future offer integrated language localization to a huge range of languages, so that when you put your marketing descriptions in, you can easily sign up to translate that quickly, professionally and seamlessly as you distribute your app. Naturally we will offer the opportunity for you to localize the content in your app too. Stay tuned.